Six of the Best 313

"The truth is that the Lib Dems badly need a central organising economic idea. They have survived for too long now on a bundle of issues around fairness and civil liberties, which - although important - are not winning reasons for government." So says David Boyle on The Real Blog.

"French actor Gérard Depardieu is in trouble with Russian liberals for his planned move to Russia," reports Simon Titley on Liberator's blog. "This move has earned a stern rebuke from the liberal party Yabloko (a member party of Liberal International). The chairman of Yabloko’s Mordovia branch has written an open letter to Depardieu with three questions to which he would like an answer."

Aberystwyth University defends its practice of accepting students with only two Es at A level. "Not everyone can achieve their full potential at school, and it’s our job to spot the talent and add the value so more people can do so at University. So, are standards at Aberystwyth high? Absolutely! Do we sometimes admit students without conventional qualifications or with lower than usual grades? Guilty as charged, m’lord – and seriously proud of it."

A people's buy-out of Britain's farmland? Colin Tudge considers the practicalities on the Soil Association site.

Harvard Gazette on a panel discussion about gun violence in America.

The career of John Auden - geologist, mountaineer and brother of the poet - is explored by Deborah Baker on The Caravan.

I quit storms Ripon Hornblower

A month ago I celebrated George Pickles, the Ripon Hornblower.

Now, on the Ripon Gazette site, comes news that he has resigned. Which is a shame, because he seemed very good at it to me.

Another councillor is quoted as saying: "I am shocked, stunned and amazed."

Rutland County Council explains why it is suing its own members

Last night, as BBC News explains, Rutland County Council voted to set aside £90,000 to prosecute three of its own members for defamation.

As I have been critical of this decision, I thought it only fair to invite the council to puts its side of the affair...



In fact you can find the council's explanation on its website, but I suspect it will bitterly regret this action before it is over - not least because of the media attention its members have brought down on their own heads.

Thanks to Matt Buck for the video.

Marsh Brook signal box

Our halt at Marshbrook has proved a little longer than I expected. After I put that post up Nigel Bishop sent me a link to his own nighttime photograph of the signal box and pointed out that Wikipedia claims it is the oldest surviving box on the railway network that is still operating.

I can't find confirmation of this claim, but I did come across Railway Signal Boxes: A Review, which was written by John Minnis and published by English Heritage.

This says:

The LNWR/GWR line across the Welsh marches was interlocked in the early 1870s and five of the squat hipped roof boxes, which are notable for being deeper than they are wide, survive. None are listed. Marsh Brook (1872) is the best surviving example of what is one of the largest groups of very early signal boxes to remain in operational use.

So it sounds as though it is, at the very least, one of the oldest boxes still operating in Britain.

Note, incidentally, that the box is called 'Marsh Brook' while the village, at least these days, is always written as 'Marshbrook'.

Changing your vocabulary to convert your opponents

Last week Mark Pack, writing on Liberal Democrat Voice, pointed us to an article on Slate about the way gay rights activists in Maryland and Maine have changed their tactics and won referendums to bring in same-sex marriage in those states.

The article is by Nathaniel Frank, who writes:

After the losses in Maine in 2009 and California a year earlier, LGBT advocates knew they needed to craft an effective [message]… 

For decades, gay advocates had framed their arguments in terms of equal rights and government benefits, often using rhetoric that was confrontational (“We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it”) and demanding (“We deserve equal rights now!”). Third Way, a centrist think tank working in the coalition with Freedom To Marry, began to unpack exactly how straight people reacted to such tactics. The group found that when straight people were asked what marriage meant to them, they spoke of love, commitment and responsibility. But when asked why they thought gay people wanted to marry, they cited rights and benefits. Tapping into anti-gay stereotypes, they suggested gay people wanted marriage for selfish reasons while they themselves wanted to express love and commitment. 

The gay rights coalition’s response was the “Why Marriage Matters” campaign. Its message was “love, commitment, family,” with no mention of rights or benefits. On the surface, it looks like any garden-variety public education campaign, a little vague, a little sappy. But … it signaled a sea change in the way gay advocates pled their case. This was a way to invite straight people to empathize with gay people, to reassure the majority that gay people wanted the same things that they did, and to shift focus from minority rights to points of commonality. The year Why Marriage Matters rolled out, 2011, was also the year that a slew of polls first showed majority national support for same-sex marriage.

I was reminded of Mark's post when I came across a press release from the Association for Psychological Science in my day job:

Public opinion on environmental issues such as climate change, deforestation, and toxic waste seems to fall along increasingly partisan lines. But new research suggests that environmental messages framed in terms of conservative morals — describing environmental stewardship in terms of fending off threats to the “purity” and “sanctity” of Earth and our bodies — may help to narrow the partisan gap. 

A study from researchers at UC Berkeley has found that while people who identified themselves as conservatives tend to be less concerned about the environment than their liberal counterparts, their motivation increased significantly when they read articles that stressed the need to “protect the purity of the environment” and were shown such repellant images as a person drinking dirty water, a forest filled with garbage, and a city under a cloud of smog ...

“These findings offer the prospect of pro-environmental persuasion across party lines,” said study co-author Robb Willer of UC Berkeley. “Reaching out to conservatives in a respectful and persuasive way is critical, because large numbers of Americans will need to support significant environment reforms if we are going to deal effectively with climate change, in particular.”

The idea is the same: you keep your views but change the language in which you campaign for them in order to win people over.

But in Briain at least, the idea that Conservatives do not instinctively care for the natural world shows how far that party has strayed from its philosophical roots.

Latest on Rutland County Council's threat to sue its own members

Last Friday I blogged about Rutland County Council's threat to sue three of its own members for defamation.

I had always understood that public bodies could not sue in this way, but according to a BBC News report I quoted in that post:

The defamation action would be possible thanks to the Localism Act 2011 which grants local authorities the power to act like an individual.

This still sounded odd to me, though I am no lawyer, and a couple of people tweeted me that evening with the same reaction.

In a post on the New Statesman site this afternoon David Allen Green, who is a lawyer, explained the issues at stake:

It is a principle of the common law of England and Wales that a public authority cannot bring an action for defamation. And this is right and proper, as being able to sue for libel (and thereby threaten to sue for libel) would have an unwelcome "chilling" effect on public criticism of governmental bodies. Individual councillors and officers can sue for defamation, but not the authorities themselves. 

However, this sensible legal safeguard appears to be under threat. The City lawyers advising Rutland County Council are saying that the recently enacted Localism Act has changed the legal position, and now it is open to public bodies to freely sue - and threaten to sue - for libel. 

Section 1 of the Localism Act provides for a "general power of competence". In particular, the Act says that a "local authority has power to do anything that individuals generally may do". 

It is not clear what this actually means, and the use of the imprecise word "generally" makes the scope of the provision inherently uncertain. But what the external lawyers to Rutland County Council have taken it to mean is that a council can sue for defamation when it could not do so before.

He goes on to describe the legal advice the council has received as not only illiberal but seemingly misconceived and discusses his reasons for this judgement.

A meeting to decide whether the council should proceed with the threatened prosecution is taking place as I write. Follow Oakham UK on Twitter for updates.

Later

@rutlandcouncil vote for legal action against its members and will pay for CEO to take action
— Oakham UK (@OakhamUK) January 10, 2013

150 years of the London Underground

Happy birthday to underground railways in London: 150 today.

I can recommend the site 150 great things about the Underground and I also like this video of a steam train passing through Turnham Green.

The nonsense of Labour's welfare policy

I am with the Liberal Democrat MPs who rebelled over the one per cent cap of benefit increases after yesterday's debate.

As Caroline Lucas said:

The Secretary of State brandishes the figure of a 20 per cent increase in benefits in the past five years. In cash terms, jobseeker’s allowance has gone up from just £59.15 in 2007 to £71 in 2012. In other words, in each of those past years JSA has gone up by just £2.50.

And as David Miliband said of the politics behind this move:

The truth is that this rancid Bill is not about affordability; it reeks of the politics of dividing lines that the current Government spent so much time denouncing when they were in opposition in the dog days of the Brown Administration. It says a lot that within two years they have had to resort to that dividing-line politics. We know the style: you invent your own enemy, you spin your campaign to a friendly newspaper editor, you “frame” the debate. But the enemy within in is not the unemployed; the enemy within is unemployment.

But what really struck me about the debate was this complaint from Liam Byrne:

Some 40,000 soldiers, 300,000 nurses and 150,000 primary and nursery school teachers will be hit by this Bill.

But why are such people receiving money from the government at all? A common complaint about welfare systems is that they use public money to subsidise bad employers, but here the government is using it to subsidise a perfectly reasonable employer - itself.

Worse than that, the last Labour government had no great appetite for making the rich pay tax. And even if a government does have that ambition, it turns out to be rather hard to do.

The result is that the tax credits for soldiers, nurses and teachers have to be financed by people in reasonably but not highly paid jobs. People like soldiers, nurses and teachers, in fact.

In other words, the whole system is a complicated way of leaving people pretty much where you found them.

The Coalition has the right idea in cutting tax rates for lower paid workers and reducing the reach of the tax credit system. They should use some of the money they have saved to protect the poorest of all from inflation.

Opening Paragraph of the Day

Won by the Huffington Post with its:

The off-duty Boulder police officer who has been suspended over his role in the killing and disposal of a neighborhood elk on Mapleton Hill last week called in sick the night of the shooting and operates a website advertising "quality taxidermy at an affordable price".

Marshbrook or Onnybrook?

"Get your things together, twins," Peter said as she opened her bag and stuffed her school hat in it. "We're nearly there." 

The train slowed down. High on their left they saw the lighted windows of the signal-box. Over the level crossing and then a flickering oil-lamp showed them - as if they didn't know - that the name was Onnybrook. 

They jumped out into six inches of snow and with their luggage round them and waved to the guard as he swung on to the step of his van and called "Good night." Then Dickie sniffed the cold air and said, "Super! I think this is the must beautiful station in the whole world. 

Malcolm Saville Wings Over Witchend (1956)

There was no snow when I was last at Marshbrook, the model for Saville's Onnybrook. The signal box and station building (on the Shrewsbury to Hereford line) are still there, though passenger services ended only two years after Wings Over Witchend was published.

Goods services lasted a few years longer, and today there is a little industrial estate in what used to the station's surprisingly large yard.

I don't know if Marshbrook was ever the most beautiful station in the world, but I like this photo with the Shropshire hills in the background.

And I can also recommend The Station Inn here too.

Six of the Best 312

The 'Gotcha' style of questioning favoured by John Humphrys damages democracy, argues Robert Sharp on Liberal Conspiracy.

Dr Alun Wyburn-Powell brings psychotherapy to bear on relations between the parties: "Viewed through the prism of Transactional Analysis, it is no surprise that the LibDem-Labour coalition negotiations failed, but the Conservatives and the LibDems managed to strike a business-like agreement."

Germany offers the best model for the successful adoption of renewable energy, argues Osha Gray Davidson in an interview with AlterNet.

"As a child in Bristol in the 1970s, apart from school, mealtimes and the odd bit of telly (mostly Blue Peter!) my life from aged 7-11 essentially consisted of what experts now call ‘free play’. Although I was very lucky to have access to woods and gardens, much of this play took place in less-than-bucolic surroundings – car-parks, estates, disused patches of land and on the street. This didn’t matter. What mattered was having some freedom to roam and to just ‘be’, to call on friends and hang out with other kids, to be away from the adult world and to create our own." Playing Out on the importance of free play - and Peter Pan.

Duncan Stephen on the curious case of Joyce Hatto - who turned out not to be "the greatest living pianist that almost no one has ever heard of".

"In the sixties and seventies when these pictures were taken, every street corner that was not occupied by a pub was home to a shop offering groceries and general supplies to the residents of the immediate vicinity. The owners of these small shops took on mythic status as all-seeing custodians of local information, offering a counterpoint to the pub as a community meeting place for the exchange of everybody’s business." Spitalfields Life has a selection of Tony Hall's photographs of East End shops.

Adjudicator appointed for the pub trade

Good news reaches me from Liberal Dem HQ, in the shape of the announcement by Vince Cable that a new independent pubs adjudicator is to be appointed to help struggling landlords suffering from unfair practices in the industry.

The adjudicator will enforce a new statutory Code, which will oversee the relationship between publicans and large pub companies (pubcos). It will ensure publicans get a fair deal on rent and the prices they pay for beer.

A party press release quotes Lib Dem MP Greg Mulholland, chair of the all-party parliamentary Save the Pub Group, who has long campaigned for a fairer deal for pubs:

“Pubs are a cornerstone of our community and many have been struggling in recent years. 

“This is great news for pubs, pubco publicans and customers and is a huge boost in terms of the Coalition Government delivering the promise to be a pro-pub Government. This will at last enshrine in law that a pubco licensee is no worse off than a Free House licensee. 

“The latest attempt at self-regulation has been a farce. There was a deliberate attempt to avoid the central problem of pubcos taking more than is fair from pub profits. It’s a great credit to Vince Cable and the Coalition Government who have finally taken the necessary action. 

“Liberal Democrats will be continuing to work in the Coalition Government to ensure tied pubco licensees can keep a fair share of their profit and have a much brighter future.”

And Lib Dem blogger Gareth Epps has welcomed the announcement too:

 the infamous revolving door of BIS that saw the now utterly-discredited pubco lobbyists, the British Beer & Pub Association, allowed to write documents for the Government has been stopped after the departure of Ed Davey from BIS. Subsequent Ministers have looked at the evidence and it is to the great credit of Vince Cable, Jo Swinson and not forgetting Norman Lamb that action has at long last been taken. 

And that action includes preventing abuses of the beer tie, which oblige publicans to sell particular types of beer. It would enshrine the fundamental principle that ‘a tied licensee should be no worse off than a free-of-tie-licensee’ which will ensure a level playing field is maintained in the pub sector.

British Transport Films: Groundwork for Progress (1959)

I found this on the BritishRailways.tv site, which describes it as:

A short film showing changes for British Railways under the Modernisation Plan and the career opportunities that might be available, until Dr Beeching got his teeth into the system a couple of years later.

Britain's 300th community shop opens

The Daily Telegraph reports the opening of Britain's 300th community shop:

When the last shop in their village closed down, the residents of Cobham were determined to give their community a focal point. 

But resigned to the fact that a shop was not economically viable, they decided the only way to build a new one was to volunteer their expertise and labour – including baking bread. 

Together they set about raising £85,000 before taking on the lease of the former convenience store, refurbishing and stocking it – and crucially recruiting 62 volunteers to run it. 

The team behind the venture in the Kent village include a lawyer, a scientist and human resources manager. 

They pooled their professional skills and expertise, with a local interior designer overseeing the layout and an investment consultant acting as company secretary. 

But they are not alone: when Cobham Village Stores opened before Christmas it became the 300th community shop as villagers across the country choose to volunteer to run their own shops, pubs and Post Offices rather than live without.

The article quotes someone from the Plunkett Trust. Back in June 2011 Mike Perry, the Trust's head of communications, wrote a guest post for this blog on the community shops movement.

He wrote:

Community-owned shops are not only opening at a rapid rate, they are also staying open. Some 97 per cent of community-owned shops that have ever opened are still open. The model works and communities are increasingly using it to try saving or introducing other vital services whether this is saving the local pub, buying land for communal growing or establishing a community-owned broadband enterprise.

Incidentally, the Plunkett Foundation turns out to be named after Sir Horace Plunkett, a Victorian agricultural reformer and MP.

Headline of the Day

Well done to the Daily Mail for:


Quack cocaine: Charity warns not to feed bread to ducks and geese as birds are becoming 'hooked' on starchy foods

St Michael and All Angels, Cwm Head

Take the lane down the hill from Hamperley Farm and you will come to the little mid-Victorian church of St Michael and All Angels at Cwm Head.

It is set on a busy B road, which makes it positively dangerous to photograph, but I did like this outbuilding in the corner of the churchyard. It is said to be a relic of the days when worshippers would arrive here by pony and trap.

A note at the end of Mystery at Witchend, Malcolm Saville's first Lone Pine story, published in 1943, says the book was written at Cwm Head, Shropshire, and Westend Farm, Wheathampstead.

Saville's wife and children came to stay at Cwm Head House, behind the church, to get away from the war. The house used to belong to friends of a friend, so I had the chance to look around it.

There is a lovely old glasshouse with cacti to the rear, and I like to think that Saville sat in there with his typewriter.

Security mania makes us feel less secure

Oliver Burkeman had an article in yesterday's Guardian Review section arguing that the modern obsession with security has had the paradoxical effect of making us feel less secure.

This is not a new argument: Frank Furedi has been making it since he published the first edition of Culture of Fear in 1997.

But Burkeman has a useful passage in which he points us to three recent books touching upon this phenomenon:

Three very different books published last year might help us rethink our troubled relationship to insecurity. 

In Against Security, the New York University sociologist Harvey Molotch focuses on "airports, subways, and other sites of ambiguous danger," arguing that in the long run, treating strangers with more kindness and less suspicion, rather than assuming the worst of every traveller, would actually increase security. 

Nassim Taleb, in his exasperating but compelling book Antifragile, praises "things that gain from disorder" – people, policies and institutions designed to thrive on volatility, instead of shattering in the encounter with it. (That the misanthropic Taleb seems to demonstrate increasing fragility when being interviewed by journalists is curious, but hardly undermines his point.) 

And in Daring Greatly, Brené Brown, a professor of social work who specialises in the psychology of vulnerability, considers the many ways in which "the courage to be vulnerable" is a precondition for fulfilling relationships, good parenting, conflict resolution and creative expression.

Martin Carthy: New York Mining Disaster 1941

It is easy to laugh at the Bee Gees for their disco heyday, but as the tribute programmes that have, sadly, been necessary in recent years have proved, they have written an awful lot of good songs over the years.

In fact, when they re-emerged in the second half of the 1970s it was as though dinosaurs had been sighted swimming up the River Welland. Beacuse I just remembered them from their first period of popularity some 10 years before.

Here, on his 1998 album Landfall, Martin Carthy makes a Bee Gees single from 1967 sound like an ancient folk song. And very good it is too.

My music videos for 2012

I started choosing a Sunday music video when I finally got broadband access in October 2007. You can find the choices for 2007 and 2008 here, for 2009 here, for 2010 here and for 2011 here.

Some of these videos have disappeared since I posted them. Where possible, I have edited the post and add an alternative version of the same song. But the moral is clear: enjoy these videos while they are hot.

1 January 2012 Aloe Blacc: I Need a Dollar
8 January 2012 U2 and Johnny Cash: The Wanderer
15 January 2012 Simon Dupree and the Big Sound: Kites
22 January 2012 Leonard Cohen: Famous Blue Raincoat
29 January 2012 Roy Harper: One of Those Days in England

5 February 2012 New Seekers: Anthem (One Day a Week)

12 February 2012 The Cure: Boys Don't Cry

19 February 2012 The Surprises: Little Sir Echo

26 February 2012 The Waterboys: The Stolen Child

4 March 2012 Engelbert Humperdinck: Les Bicyclettes de Belsize

11 March 2012 Sam the Sham and the Pharoahs: Woolly Bully

18 March 2012 David Essex: Rock On

25 March 2012 Spencer Davis Group: Together Till the End of Time

1 April 2012 Chris Isaak: Wicked Game

8 April 2012 Aprile Millo: Ineggiamo

15 April 2012 Steve Winwood: John Barleycorn Must Die

22 April 2012 Bow Wow Wow: Go Wild in the Country

29 April 2012 David McWilliams: The Days of Pearly Spencer

6 May 2012 Brick Supply: Not So Manic Now

13 May 2012 The Quangos: Settle Down

20 May 2012 Sandy Denny: Fotheringay

27 May 2012 Harry J & The All Stars: The Liquidator

3 June 2012 The Sex Pistols: God Save the Queen

10 June 2012 Contempt: Money is a Girl's Best Friend

17 June 2012 Peter Green: Man of the World

24 June 2012 Ronnie Lane & Slim Chance: How Come

1 July 2012 Pluto: Dat

8 July 2012 Captain Sensible: Wot

15 July 2012 Steve Winwood and Carlos Santana: Why Can't We Live Together

22 July 2012 Chris Barber's Jazz Band: Petite Fleur

29 July 2012 Gordon Lightfoot: Daylight Katy

5 August 2012 The SY6: We Make Hay

12 August 2012 Ennio Morricone: Once Upon a Time in the West

19 August 2012 Queen: Seven Seas of Rhye

26 August 2012 Jackie Trent: Where Are You Now, My Love?

2 September 2012 The Stranglers: Walk On By

9 September 2012 Free: Wishing Well

16 September 2012 Kate Bush: The Kick Inside

23 September 2012 The Bangles: Hazy Shade of Winter

30 September 2012 The Mobiles: Drowning in Berlin

7 October 2012 Joni Mitchell: The Last Time I Saw Richard

14 October 2012 Harry Chapin: WOLD

21 October 2012 Leonard Cohen: Closing Time

28 October 2012 Spencer Davis Group: Mean Woman Blues

4 November 2012 Jimi Hendrix: Voodoo Chile

11 November 2012 Sam Carter: Jack Hall

18 November 2012 Ginger Baker's Air Force: Man of Constant Sorrow

25 November 2012 Benjamin Britten: Cuckoo! from Friday Afternoons

2 December 2012 10cc: I'm Mandy Fly Me

9 December 2012 Cyril Davies All Stars and Long John Baldry: See See Rider

16 December 2012 Syreeta: Spinnin' and Spinnin'

23 December 2012 Yes: Wonderous Stories

30 December 2012 Elvis Costello: The Other Side of Summer

Now to put them in alphabetical order...

Six of the Best 311

"Labour’s exploitation of popular fears to rubbish the government’s supposed softness on terrorism is deeply cynical," says Sadakat Kadri on the London Review of Books blog.

"The early years sector needs to rethink the way it presents itself to parents – currently many parents see an institution with professionals who will take responsibility for early years education. They simply don’t understand the meaning of partnership. Nor do staff. The simple message in early years of partnership is neither understood nor put into practice in the way it should be." Tim Linehan on the British Politics and Policy at LSE Blog discusses the implications of long-term youth unemployment for society and argues that various interventions, such as literacy programmes, can make a positive difference.

The pubco model is so damaging to pubs that we should not be trying to prop it up, argues The Good, the Bad and the Pubcos.

Walt Disney thought Song of the South would be his masterpiece. Today it is impossible to see it. John Lingan on Slate explains why.

Also at the movies, Feeling Listless proves that "Love Actually is about middle class white men seducing their employees and the only two female lead characters have unhappy endings."

Flip Chart Fairy Tales explores how Father Christmas might fare under corporate management.